Uncategorized
Seeking latitude to press liberal causes, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs distances itself from federations
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the onetime standard-bearer for outreach to the non-Jewish world whose influence has waned, is loosening its financial and organizational ties to the Jewish Federations of North America in a bid to reassert its traditional role.
The decision announced Monday to go it alone, announced in a press release and a two-page brochure that will go out to Jewish organizations, will free the JCPA to pursue liberal agenda items that are favored by American Jews but can alienate or unsettle donors to the federation system who are more conservative or at least more cautious about maintaining an appearance of being nonpartisan.
The decision marks a resolution to tensions that surged in 2020, when JCPA was among 600 Jewish groups to sign onto a full-page New York Times ad declaring “Black Lives Matter.” That set off alarms among some conservative donors because of the anti-Israel positions adopted by some of the Black Lives Matter movement’s leading individuals and organizations.
As a result, JCPA and JFNA entered into talks about their shared future. Insiders said last year, as tensions burst into public view, that it was likely that the ailing JCPA would fold wholly into JFNA.
Instead, after a process that included officials from both groups as well as from local Jewish community relations councils, which are mostly controlled by their local Jewish federations, the decision was to tease apart the organizations. The decision means that JCPA will no longer officially speak on behalf of the community relations councils, and also will not draw dues from them or from the 16 national organizations that have funded it up to now.
But while the group will take on a fundraising challenge, those who engineered the new structure say it will also be insulated from the difficulties of arriving at a consensus in an increasingly polarized political environment.
Rabbi Doug Kahn, the retired longtime director of the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council who was a consultant in the restructuring, said the new arrangement is meant to offer a positive answer to the question, “Can we move forward in a way that enables us to be more impactful on our core issues, and more nimble at the same time, while retaining close relationships with our key stakeholders going forward?”
Rori Pickler Neiss, who heads the St. Louis JCRC, was among a number of local community relations council directors who had lost hope that the JCPA could adequately represent them. Now she said, she was hopeful it could resume its role of convening a national Jewish consensus around critical issues.
“The model of consensus-building in the way that some of the mainstream organizations talk about it has really been consensus towards a very narrow group of voices that wants to claim representation of the entire Jewish community,” she said. The newly constituted JCPA “is opening itself up to what could be greater consensus in a sense of a much broader community than many of our models have allowed for.”
The brochure tied to the split indicates some of the issues on which the renewed JCPA will advocate. “JCPA will represent a strong independent voice within the American Jewish community on issues aimed at strengthening our democracy and commitment to an inclusive and just society out of the belief that such conditions are essential in a pluralistic society and for the well-being of the Jewish people and Israel,” it said. “The reset takes place against a backdrop of rising antisemitism, racism, bigotry and hate, and polarization, and continued threats to our democracy.”
The group is launching two new initiatives, both apparently likely to dismay conservatives. One would focus on “voting rights, election integrity, disinformation, extremism as a threat to democracy, and civics education.” The other would focus on “racial justice, criminal justice reform and gun violence, LGBTQ rights, immigration rights, reproductive rights, and fighting hate violence.”
Some of the 16 groups that have paid dues to the JCPA in the past are supporting the restructured group. The new JCPA will rely at first on a three-year commitment from the UJA Federation of New York, one of the biggest pillars of the JFNA.
It’s not clear yet how the more conservative among the 16 groups will react. Nathan Diament, the Washington director for the Orthodox Union, said his group would wait and see how the new JCPA develops. But he said he regretted the polarization that led to the change.
“The trajectory of that JCPA is a reflection of the of the broader trend, more than anything about the JCPA itself,” Diament said. “It’s harder to find consensus these days with regards to Israel, it’s harder to find consensus with regard to a large list of domestic policy matters. I mean, even while we were in the JCPA we were in the position of having to dissent on some prominent issues.”
David Bohm, the current JCPA chairman who led the restructuring talks, said the organization would remain nonpartisan — but acknowledged that it’s become harder to maintain the perception.
“In today’s polarized environment, people get accused of being partisan when they take a stand on any issue, so I don’t know if that can be totally avoided,” he said in an interview.
The JFNA in a statement welcomed the new configuration. “We look forward to continuing to work collaboratively with JCPA — as we always have — as it tackles issues of importance to Jewish communities in its new format.”
In an interview, Elana Broitman, JFNA’s senior vice president for public affairs, said the new configuration would allow the JCPA to delve deeper on its favored issues. “If the JCPA is focused on particular issues, they can perhaps go into more depth on those issues that they had the opportunity to before,” she said.
In the past, the JCPA has taken positions on issues like voting rights, gun control, immigration rights and abortion, because they were favored by the local JCRCs with which it consulted and which sent delegates to its annual conference. Those JCRCs often initiated liberal policies, in part because they were favored by an American Jewish grassroots that polls show trends overwhelmingly liberal.
Another factor was the give and take in local community relations: Jewish groups seeking support for Jewish issues from Black, Latino, Asian American and other minority groups were happy to reciprocate on those groups’ favored issues.
But the JCPA’s profile on those issues has diminished in recent years; the smaller donor base triggered by the 2008 recession forced the vast majority of JCRCs to fold into their local federations, and to reflect the priorities of the federation donor base as opposed to the congregations, Jewish labor groups and fraternal organizations that once drove the agenda for Jewish community relations.
Tensions between the JCPA and the JFNA intensified in the summer of 2020, after a Minneapolis policeman murdered George Floyd, triggering civil rights protests and the “Black Lives Matter” ad by Jewish groups that JCPA signed onto.
The JFNA CEO, Eric Fingerhut, insiders said then, was not happy about having to explain to donors why JCPA was embracing a group identified closely with a movement perceived by some conservatives as radical and anti-Israel.
The new JCPA is betting that there are donors ready to support a progressive domestic Jewish lobby. In addition to the three-year grant from UJA-Federation, two other grants will come from a past chairwoman of the JCPA, Lois Frank, and its current chairman, Bohm.
Bohm, an attorney who assumed leadership of the JCPA in 2021, said the group would take a hit by losing the JFNA’s allocations and the dues it collects from the 125 community relations councils — but he expected to make it up with money from foundations invested in the the JCPA’s new agenda, including from individual federations.
“We expect we may lose some funding,” he said. “We’re hoping it’s not significant.”
“We are beginning to hear from foundations that have not historically necessarily focused on community relations, but now recognize why that is such an important part in the toolkit,” Kahn added.
Bohm said the board would be independent and limited to 30 people. “We will continue to have board members who are either JCRC directors or current or past chairs of JCRCs, but they will not be representing their specific community,” he said in an email after the interview. “Instead they will represent the Jewish community relations field as a whole.”
JCPA’s annual budget is now less than $2 million, Kahn said, down from nearly $4 million in 2015, and its staff has dropped from 13 in the 2000s to four. The group is seeking a fifth staffer now and hope eventually to employ at least 13.
Beyond polarization, a number of factors have been at play in diminishing the role of consensus-based Jewish community relations. There has been a flourishing of single-issue nonprofit groups, many of them Jewish, that are more attractive to donors than general interest groups.
Kahn noted that in the mid-1990s when many of the agenda items the national Jewish community pursued for decades seemed to be resolving themselves: Peace was breaking out between Israel and its neighbors, the Soviet Union collapsed and freed its Jews to travel, immigration reform was on track and race relations appeared to be improving.
“There was this shift from focusing on the external challenges or threats to more of the internal threats within the Jewish community,” he said, referring to an emphasis on Jewish education to counter assimilation.
The fragility of the hopes for peace and democratic growth in the 1990s were made evident in subsequent years with the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the eruption of the Second Intifada and the rise of nativist sentiment and its attendant bigotries, culminating in the Trump presidency.
Kahn said his hope was that the JCPA would once again assume the role it played from 1944, when it was founded as the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council: raising Holocaust awareness and taking the lead in promoting immigration in the late 1940s, establishing the Black-Jewish alliance in the 1950s, defending Israel in the 1960s, and advocating for Soviet Jewry until the USSR’s collapse.
He saw hope in the turnout of non-Jewish support for Jews after the recent deadly attacks on Jewish institutions, including the gunman who massacred 11 worshipers in Pittsburgh in 2018. “I think this model will enable that kind of solidarity-building around issues of common cause to grow infinitely greater than it’s been able to, up until now,” he said.
—
The post Seeking latitude to press liberal causes, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs distances itself from federations appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Oct. 7 spurred this secular private school in Manhattan to start holding an annual Shabbat gathering
(New York Jewish Week) — A new Jewish tradition has taken hold at a private, non-Jewish school in Manhattan.
On a recent Friday, about 240 students, parents and educators from the Town School, located on the Upper East Side, stayed late to eat matzah ball soup, recite blessings over challah and candles, and sing Hebrew songs.
It was the third time in as many years that the school had held a Shabbat celebration, and more than half of the students and parents in attendance weren’t Jewish.
“I think there is a real enthusiasm and excitement for families who are not Jewish to come into their first Shabbat or learn more about it again,” said Pierangelo Rossi, the Town School’s director of equity and community action.
Originally from Peru, Rossi is not Jewish. His first Shabbat experience ever was at the Town School in 2024, after Jewish parents organized a gathering in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
For years, the school had special “affinity groups” and spaces for students and parents of color, for “white anti-racist” students, and for queer students and their allies. The attack, and the surge of antisemitism that followed, spurred Jewish students and parents to work with the school to create their own.
While the Town School does not collect information about students’ religion, officials estimate that at least a quarter of the student body is Jewish.
“After Oct. 7, we knew — and it became clear to all of us — that our Jewish community was looking for that sense of affirmation in a way they hadn’t before,” said Head of School Doug Brophy.
Brophy, who has led the Town School since 2018, understood how they felt. He is also vice president of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side.
Affinity groups have emerged as a hot-button issue in the debate over DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion. While their proponents say the groups give minority and marginalized populations desperately needed spaces of their own, critics of DEI say the groups can reinforce divisions and inappropriately inject progressive ideologies into schools and other institutions.
Jewish “anti-woke” advocates have particularly criticized the affinity group framework for too often forcing Jewish students into a binary framework about race and privilege that does not recognize the complexity of Jewish identity.
At the same time, tensions amid the aftermath of Oct. 7 roiled some New York City private schools. The head of one elite private school stepped down last summer after members of the school community clashed over identity, antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Gaza war.
At the Town School, officials and parents say, those tensions have been absent. Instead, the entire school community has embraced the Shabbat celebrations alongside the other special events held to honor students’ traditions, such as a lion parade on the school’s block to mark Lunar New Year and a Persian New Year observance led by parents.
“Whether it’s coming from a vulnerability or a difference, it’s [about] wanting to be part of something bigger than yourself, and not just our Jewish families and colleagues feeling a sense of identity, but everyone else developing a greater sense of empathy,” Brophy said.
The Town School is not the only non-Jewish private school in the city to hold Shabbat celebrations in recent years: Riverdale Country Day School in the Bronx says 700 people attended its November 2024 gathering. But it has committed to annual gatherings, which are growing in attendance.
That first Shabbat in 2024 was led by Rabbi Bradley Solmsen from the Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue; in 2025, by Rabbi Rena Rifkin from Stephen Wise; and this year, by Ana Turkienicz, an educator from the Upper West Side’s Rodeph Sholom School and the Pelham Jewish Center.
“For me, it was really a very different context where you have non-Jews that are interested in learning about what is it that Jews do and are open,” Turkienicz said. “And it was beautiful.”
To create an educational plan that was still engaging for children of all ages, she narrowed the focus of the event to two words: “Shabbat” and “shalom,” meaning “Sabbath” and “peace.”
“I need to use vocabulary, and I need to work with the room only, with those with concepts that are universal,” Turkienicz added. “And there is a lot. There’s a lot in ‘Shabbat’ and ‘shalom’ that are universal.”
She taught the guests the songs “Bim Bam” and “Salaam” — the latter being the Arabic word for “shalom” — and recited the blessings over the candles and challah, and the younger children decorated placemats, while the older children hung out with their classmates.
14-year-old Daniel Rybak stuck around near the school after his last class of the day got out so he could attend the after-school Shabbat service for his second time.
Rybak, whose mother is Catholic and whose father is Jewish, has attended the Town School for nine years.
“Just talking about the greater world at this point, with all the troubles in the Levant, with Israel and Gaza, as well as just the general sense, I suppose, that things are getting a little more violent around the world — it’s just a nice thing that brings people back to that sense of, ‘Hey, we’re here, we’re family, we’re OK, we’re getting through this,’” Rybak said. “It just shows that even throughout all that that’s happened everywhere, there’s still pockets of community and of real hope.”
This year, the Shabbat gathering took on added meaning for some attendees as some of New York’s Jews feel increasingly alienated or afraid following the election of Zohran Mamdani, a longtime and staunch critic of Israel, to the mayor’s office.
“The whole time I was thinking: 20 blocks north from here, there is a new mayor that we don’t know what [he’s] going to be for the Jewish community in New York,” Turkienicz said. “Twenty blocks south of his mansion, we have a private, non-Jewish school doing a Kabbalat Shabbat.”
Katy Williamson, a Jewish parent who helped organize the last two Town School Shabbats and attended this year’s, said she was “really blown away by the sense of community” and surprised by how many people attended.
“I read the news. Obviously, we live in New York City. I’m very aware of what’s going on outside of this, just in the world right now,” she said. “There was just this really warm feeling. … So many people from the school community joined and wanted to be a part of it.”
The post Oct. 7 spurred this secular private school in Manhattan to start holding an annual Shabbat gathering appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Trump’s antisemitism envoy rebukes European rabbi, drawing praise from Elon Musk
(JTA) — A disagreement over how to define the sources of rising antisemitism in Europe escalated into a public clash this week between two prominent Jewish leaders, with tech billionaire Elon Musk intervening to back the U.S. government’s antisemitism envoy over a prominent European rabbi.
The dispute centers on remarks made Wednesday at the World Economic Forum by Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis, during a panel discussion on antisemitism, extremism and social cohesion.
Responding to a question about the surge of antisemitism in Germany and beyond, Goldschmidt said the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel had triggered a dramatic global rise in antisemitic incidents, including what he described as organized and state-sponsored activity on university campuses and in public spaces.
Goldschmidt then linked broader political developments in Europe to immigration-related anxieties.
“I think the rise of the extreme right in many European countries is a response to the insecurity felt by the so-called old Europeans regarding the new immigrants who came from the Middle East,” he said.
He went on to argue that combating antisemitism and Islamophobia together was in the shared interest of Jewish and Muslim communities, pointing to past interfaith initiatives he said had helped promote social cohesion.
Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, publicly criticized Goldschmidt’s remarks on X, calling them a misreading of the drivers of contemporary antisemitism in Europe. The intervention marked one of Kaploun’s first major public statements since his Senate confirmation in December.
“Blaming ‘old Europe’ for the present surge in antisemitism is disgraceful,” Kaploun wrote, arguing instead that mass migration has played a significant role in recent antisemitic violence and threats to Jewish safety.
“I am proud to serve in an administration that understands that mass migration is a huge driver of antisemitism,” Kaploun wrote. “It creates dramatic social changes and threatens the safety of all citizens. This administration, led by President Trump and Secretary Rubio, recognizes and confronts today’s challenges with clarity. Mass migration itself threatens the safety of Jews and all communities.”
Musk, the owner of X, amplified Kaploun’s critique by reposting his comments and replying, “Exactly. Thank you for speaking up,” a move that quickly broadened the dispute beyond Jewish communal circles.
Goldschmidt responded within hours, rejecting the characterization of his remarks and saying they had been taken out of context. He said he did not blame European culture for antisemitism and reiterated that he views antisemitism as stemming from multiple ideological sources, including the far right, the far left and radical Islamist violence.
“I never blamed ‘old Europe’ for the current rise in antisemitism,” Goldschmidt wrote, adding that his Davos comments were intended to explain political reactions to immigration, not to excuse antisemitic attacks.
The exchange highlights a growing divide among Jewish leaders over how to frame antisemitism amid polarized debates about immigration, integration and public safety — debates that have increasingly spilled into partisan politics in the United States.
Kaploun’s emphasis on migration echoes language used by Vice President JD Vance, who said in December that reducing immigration was “the single most significant thing” the United States could do to curb antisemitism, while dismissing claims of rising antisemitic sentiment within the Republican Party.
The dispute also reflects longstanding institutional tensions. Kaploun is affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which has grown into a dominant force in Jewish communal life in Russia and parts of Europe. Goldschmidt, a former chief rabbi of Moscow who left Russia after refusing to endorse the war in Ukraine, represents a European rabbinic establishment that has at times clashed with Chabad over authority and representation.
The post Trump’s antisemitism envoy rebukes European rabbi, drawing praise from Elon Musk appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Rabbi among dozens arrested in faith leaders’ anti-ICE protest in Minnesota
(JTA) — At least one local rabbi was arrested Friday in Minneapolis as hundreds of faith leaders from around the country gathered to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the Twin Cities.
Rabbi Emma Kippley-Ogman, the Jewish and interfaith chaplain at Macalester College in St. Paul, was briefly detained by police alongside leaders of other faiths while staging a protest at the airport.
In photos and video from the protest just before the arrest, Kipley-Ogman can be seen delivering brief remarks while wearing a rainbow tallit and standing in a line at the airport’s arrivals gate with several other faith leaders who hold hands and pray. Kipley-Ogman did not immediately return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment.
Rabbi Aaron Weininger, who leads the Conservative Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Minnetonka, was also demonstrating at the airport and witnessed Kippley-Ogman’s arrest. He said the rabbi “was in the lineup of clergy being prepared to get arrested.”
“The goal was to disrupt operations because [the airport] is being used to deport folks, like three flights a day,” Weininger told JTA. He described the overall mood of the protest as “very peaceful.” In photos from the event, he is wearing a tallit and holding a sign reading “ICE Out of Minneapolis.”
He continued, “The clergy brought out the best of what faith does, which is lifting people up, building community and speaking up for justice. There was song, there was prayer, a lot of relationship-building. The crowd was calm but also very clear, calling to the end of the atrocities that ICE is committing.”
In an Instagram video from the airport, Rabbi Daniel Kirzane of the Reform KAM Isaiah Israel in Chicago, wearing a beanie from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, said he had come to the protest because “the Torah teaches us that society and government are meant to protect people, not to scare them and not to brutalize them.”
The three were among an estimated 100 rabbis and Jewish leaders on the ground for “ICE Out” events across the Twin Cities Friday, after local clergy issued a broader call for a show of strength to combat the region’s intensified ICE activity over the past few weeks. Many local Jewish institutions, including the federation, the JCC, Jewish day schools and Jewish social services groups, have condemned ICE’s presence.
While mainstream Jewish groups say they are not opposed to responsible immigration enforcement, a steady stream of distressing incidents in Minnesota — including including the shooting death of Renee Good by an ICE agent, the detention of a 5-year-old child, and agents reportedly forcing open the door of a U.S. citizen — have galvanized a faith-based response in starkly moral terms.
“What did we learn from the Holocaust? We have to act and we have to resist,” one visiting rabbi, Diane Tracht of Reform-affiliated Temple Israel near Gary, Indiana, told Religion News Service while patrolling a heavily Hispanic and Somali region looking for ICE activity. “If I’m not going to act and resist now, then I shouldn’t call myself a rabbi and I can’t be a proud Jew.”
Dozens of the rabbis on the ground Friday were activated through T’ruah, the Jewish social justice network. Also present were Rabbi Jonah Pesner, head of the Union for Reform Judaism’s religious action center; Avodah CEO Cheryl Cook; Bend the Arc CEO Jamie Beran; and members of Conservative Judaism’s social justice commission, among others.
“It’s all rooted in the biblical commandment that we were slaves in Egypt, and we’re to love the stranger,” Pesner told TC Jewfolk, a local Jewish news site. “The biblical text repeats that 36 different times in 36 different ways, and it really calls our clergy to action.”
The airport protest was just one of several anti-ICE events that local and national clergy staged in the Twin Cities area Friday, amid frigid temperatures that saw wind chill as low as 40-below. Temple Israel, a prominent Reform congregation in Minneapolis, also hosted an interfaith prayer service.
“Each and every one of our traditions believes in the dignity of every human being,” Temple Israel Senior Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman told the gathered crowd Friday morning, to applause.
After extolling the virtues of the region’s diversity, Zimmerman added, “When I began this work, and I was ordained in 1988, I said these words. But it wasn’t against the reality that we have today. Now we have to walk these words. We have to live these words. And it is, in my mind, the moment that history will define us. And guess what, history is on our side.”
Another local Jewish leader took a different protest tactic, urging a day of fasting on Friday.
“In Jewish tradition, when a community faces crisis, violence, injustice or moral collapse, we do not look away. The Talmud describes an ancient custom of instituting communal fast days,” Rabbi Tamar Magill-Grimm, senior rabbi at the Conservative Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, said during an interfaith press conference earlier in the week. “Fasting is not about self-affliction. It is about clarity. It is about refusing to numb ourselves to suffering.”
Vice President JD Vance visited Minneapolis on Thursday, where he sought to defend the Trump administration’s immigration policies while also hoping to “turn down the temperature.”
Faith communities have emerged as a crucial dimension of the protests, with Attorney General Pam Bondi announcing Thursday the arrests of three anti-ICE protesters who had been involved in disrupting a church service over the weekend. A planned anti-ICE rally in New York City Friday afternoon was set to feature Rabbi Stephanie Kolin, of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, as one of the speakers.
The post Rabbi among dozens arrested in faith leaders’ anti-ICE protest in Minnesota appeared first on The Forward.